by ANATOL LIEVEN
Female US Marines with Afghan women and children during a search-and-seizure operation, Helmand province, June 2010 PHOTO/Jerome Sessini/Magnum Photos
Afghanistan from the Cold War Through the War on Terror
by Barnett R. Rubin
Oxford University Press, 504 pp., $34.95
Talibanistan: Negotiating the Borders Between Terror, Politics, and Religion
edited by Peter Bergen with Katherine Tiedemann
Oxford University Press, 496 pp., $24.95 (paper)
Fountainhead of Jihad: The Haqqani Nexus, 1973–2012
by Vahid Brown and Don Rassler
Columbia University Press, 320 pp., $35.00
A very strange idea has spread in the Western media concerning Afghanistan: that the US military is withdrawing from the country next year, and that the present Afghan war has therefore entered into an “endgame.” The use of these phrases reflects a degree of unconscious wishful thinking that amounts to collective self-delusion.
In fact, according a treaty signed by the United States and the Karzai administration, US military bases, aircraft, special forces, and advisers will remain in Afghanistan at least until the treaty expires in 2024. These US forces will be tasked with targeting remaining elements of al-Qaeda and other international terrorist groups operating from Afghanistan and Pakistan; but equally importantly, they will be there to prop up the existing Afghan state against overthrow by the Taliban. The advisers will continue to train the Afghan security forces. So whatever happens in Afghanistan after next year, the United States military will be in the middle of it—unless of course it is forced to evacuate in a hurry.
The New York Review of Books for more